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from the Who-LiveStream's-the-Watchmen? dept.
The Root reports that “Almost half of Americans hate their police department:”
[DrugAbuse.com] examined over 766,000 tweets about sentiment toward law enforcement in each state. The state with the most positive perception of police was New Hampshire. The most negative: Arkansas. The city with the most positive perception of police was Columbus, Ohio, while the one with the most negative was, not surprisingly, Ferguson, Mo. Other “failing” city police departments included Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, New York and Denver. Baltimore, a city still reeling from recent unrest, received a D grade….
“If you talk to young people in Baltimore, I don’t think their feelings about police have changed at all in the last five to seven years,” says [Philip Leaf, a Johns Hopkins University professor]. “There has been a negative perception of police in many communities for a long time. There just haven’t been conversations with these young people or in the media about it until recently. There hasn’t been an upsurge of disconnect with the police. With cellphones, there has been documentation of things that people have been talking about for a long time. People haven’t been believed, and now it’s hard not to believe it, if you see it on TV.…”
“It’s not as if this stuff hasn’t been going on all along for decades, but now it’s being captured for the world to see, and the few bad apples being captured on camera are ruining the entire tree of law enforcement,” says Hassan Giordano, 39, and a candidate for Baltimore City Council. “However, those very same people who have a negative opinion of police will also be the same ones calling 911 when they find themselves in an unsafe situation. It’s a catch-22.”
It's important to note that on the graphs shown in the article, even an A grade represents negative sentiment.
More data and a description of the methodology are available at DrugAbuse.com, including graphs of tweet sentiment involving alcohol, drugs, and marijuana. DrugAbuse.com used the commercial IBM service AlchemyAPI to analyze the tweets.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 26 2015, @10:26PM
This is totally untrue. There is a third category. You are doing nothing wrong and get stopped anyway. See your bias? It happened to me this very year and I'm a white guy with a nice fancy car.
I bought a treadmill off Craigslist, picked it up from some guy who lived near the Canadian border. On the way there, I vaguely recall seeing border patrol on dirt bikes near an old dirt road. Picked it up, drove over a bump too hard, got worried that something had fallen off the thing I just bought, drove till I could turn around (passing dirt bike border patrol in the process), turned around (passed dirt bike border patrol on way back to the bump), checked out the area where I drove over the bump, turned around and headed home (passed dirt bike border patrol a third time). They pulled me over for that. Of course by then it was dark, they had no flashing lights, and instead surrounded me like a biker gang on a lonely desolate road. Not pleasant.
Driving up and down a road at the speed limit, properly licensed and registered, is certainly not a crime. How many times have you left home, realized you forgot something, drove home, and then went back on your way? But when the thugs have guns, you pull over and hope for the best.
(Score: 1) by archfeld on Wednesday August 26 2015, @10:34PM
OK I can't argue that issue but in the scope of the numbers I posted that is a TINY, TINY fraction, and cops are just people, there are assholes in every profession, and BORDER PATROL are not cops in my mind but federally employed minimum wage thugs. I still stand by my statements...
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @11:14PM
You stand by your statements that the cops are, in essence, always in the right?
Even when the cop dropped the taser after murdering that guy, and then claimed there was a struggle over it? That was an outright lie
You realise that there is a backlash against police for a reason, right? The police are, at this time, using excessive force against the public for minor infractions - or even just imagined infractions; how about tasering a man for having the audacity to be epileptic?
You overlook assault and murder, wrongful convictions, simply because of a juvenile "cowboys and indians" mindset where you are the cowboys, and everyone else is a potential villain and you must find out what crimes they've committed.
You were part of the problem, and will continue to be part of the problem until you start holding the police accountable for their crimes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @11:48PM
> BORDER PATROL are not cops in my mind but federally employed minimum wage thugs.
They can arrest people, they have qualified immunity, they are cops.
You should consider why its that you can see a problem with a group you want to exclude yourself from. That's practically a no true scottsman fallacy.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday August 27 2015, @02:35AM
If cops are just people, then they are susceptible to the corrupting influence of power (which we see they are) and should therefore be held to extremely high standards (which they aren't). How many cops harassed people in that nonsensical stop-and-frisk policy? That was a violation of people's constitutional rights, and so any of them that participated or defended it are bad cops. In general, any cop that enforces unconstitutional laws or violates people's constitutional rights is a bad cop. Any cops that defend or lie for cops that actually commit abuses are also bad cops.